When The Coast reaches Luke Boyd by phone, he’s just leaving the studio, still high on the new music he’s making that he anticipates will drop this spring. “I still go to the studio every day, because I still got the same hobby as when I was a 15 year old kid,” the rapper better known by his stage name Classified says. “But now I'm not worried about getting to work the next day or you know, not worried about the business and the money side as much. I’m more focused on just creating cool stuff, putting it out and letting it do what it does.” Lately, that cool stuff has looked like acoustic re-workings of songs from Class’s 22-album-deep repertoire, in the album Retrospected. And the “letting it do what it does” part? Well, that’s looked like yet another Juno nomination for the rapper. (He’s been nominated for Canada’s answer to the Grammys 10 times before and took home the trophy for Rap Recording of the Year in 2013.)
“It's always exciting. I think you know, as an artist, someone takes a lot of pride and passion in music, anytime—whether it's the ECMAs, even music Nova Scotia awards or Junos—recognizes your stuff, it feels good,” Boyd adds. “It’s not what you drive for when you're making the music, but when you see it, it's like: ‘Okay, cool. People are recognizing what I'm doing with it.’ Especially on the levels of the Junos and the fact that it's an acoustic Hip Hop album, with older songs: That was the big surprise for me that they would still recognize something that is older songs put together in this very unique project.”
The project is, to Boyd, a chance to show people the versatility of his genre: “Just put it over a guitar line and it becomes more about the songwriting and storytelling. That's the thing I think a lot of pride in: Showing that hip hop does have some of the best storytellers or some of the best subjects in music. Other genres, you can’t talk about a lot of stuff.”
And that storytelling focus is exactly what fans can expect when they attend one of Classified’s upcoming Halifax concerts, happening Feb 17 and 18 at The Light House Arts Centre at 8pm with Reeny Smith opening. “You know, being a kid in Enfield at 15 years old who fell in love with hip hop and started hitch-hiking the city to meet JoRun [Bombay, legendary Halifax producer], who showed me how to make beats— and going from there to meeting my heroes and doing songs with Snoop Dogg, touring around the world: Just telling these stories about a lot of these things that came to be,” Boyd says. “Talking about the songs, and where the songs came from. And yeah, just a more personal, storytelling version of my normal shows. We're all sitting down, it's very calm, chill, very back and forth. People throw out requests at the show. It’s supposed to feel like you came over to my house.”